shington upon what a slender
thread this political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had
been to foresee the end from the beginning.

It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the
literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper
secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action
rather than reflection, of the turning of many separate currents
into one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together,"
runs Franklin's well-known witticism in Independence Hall, "or, most
assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor!
And that homely, cheery, daring sentence gives the keynote of much of
the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in
the state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the
pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in
the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson.

We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the
Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written
by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and
Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the
Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the
people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate
was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the
majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the
conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture,
of course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty
pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old
order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy
letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their new
home in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national life and
literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues are
never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork
of the road.

There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with
delicate literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of
controversy--members, in Crevecoeur's touching words, of the "secret
communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace,
what must I do?" asks Crevecoeur in his "Letters from an American
Farmer." "I was happy before this unfortunate Revol